Alfonso Mejia

Panta Rhei 2013–2015: global perspectives on hydrology, society and change

ABSTRACT In 2013, the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) launched the hydrological decade 2013–2022 with the theme “Panta Rhei: Change in Hydrology and Society”. The decade recognizes the urgency of hydrological research to understand and predict the interactions of society and water, to support sustainable water resource use under changing climatic and environmental conditions. This paper reports on the first Panta Rhei biennium 2013–2015, providing a comprehensive resource that describes the scope and direction of Panta Rhei. We bring together the knowledge of all the Panta Rhei working groups, to summarize the most pressing research questions and how the hydrological community is progressing towards those goals. We draw out interconnections between different strands of research, and reflect on the need to take a global view on hydrology in the current era of human impacts and environmental change. Finally, we look back to the six driving science questions identified at the outset of Panta Rhei, to quantify progress towards those aims. Editor D. Koutsoyiannis; Associate editor not assigned

A stochastic model of streamflow for urbanized basins

Given the critical role of the streamflow regime for instream, riparian, and floodplain ecosystem sustainability, modeling the long-term effect of urbanization on streamflow is important to predict possible changes in stream ecosystems. Since flow duration curves are largely used to characterize the streamflow regime and define indices for stream ecosystem health, we present two stochastic models, with different levels of complexity, that link the key physical features of urbanized basins with rainfall variability to determine the resulting flow duration curves. The two models are tested against 11 basins with various degrees of urban development, characterized by the percentage of impervious areas in the basin. Results show that the more complex model needs to be used to reproduce accurately the entire flow duration curve. The analysis performed suggests that the transformation of green (i.e., water used in evapotranspiration) to blue (i.e., streamflow) water in urbanized basins is an important long-term source of ecohydrological alteration. The modeling scheme also provides useful links between rainfall variability, urbanization levels, and some streamflow indices of high and low flows.

Eastern U.S. Verification of Ensemble Precipitation Forecasts

AbstractThe quality of ensemble precipitation forecasts across the eastern United States is investigated, specifically, version 2 of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Global Ensemble Forecast System Reforecast (GEFSRv2) and Short Range Ensemble Forecast (SREF) system, as well as NCEP’s Weather Prediction Center probabilistic quantitative precipitation forecast (WPC-PQPF) guidance. The forecasts are verified using multisensor precipitation estimates and various metrics conditioned upon seasonality, precipitation threshold, lead time, and spatial aggregation scale. The forecasts are verified, over the geographic domain of each of the four eastern River Forecasts Centers (RFCs) in the United States, by considering first 1) the three systems or guidance, using a common period of analysis (2012–13) for lead times from 1 to 3 days, and then 2) GEFSRv2 alone, using a longer period (2004–13) and lead times from 1 to 16 days. The verification results indicate that, across the eastern United ...

Postprocessing of GEFS Precipitation Ensemble Reforecasts over the U.S. Mid-Atlantic Region

AbstractThe potential of Bayesian model averaging (BMA) and heteroscedastic censored logistic regression (HCLR) to postprocess precipitation ensembles is investigated. For this, outputs from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) 11-member Global Ensemble Forecast System Reforecast, version 2 (GEFSRv2), dataset are used. As part of the experimental setting, 24-h precipitation accumulations and forecast lead times of 24 to 120 h are used, over the mid-Atlantic region (MAR) of the United States. In contrast with previous postprocessing studies, a wider range of forecasting conditions is considered here when evaluating BMA and HCLR. Additionally, BMA and HCLR have not yet been compared against each other under a common and consistent experimental setting. To compare and verify the postprocessors, different metrics are used (e.g., skills scores and reliability diagrams) conditioned upon the forecast lead time, precipitation threshold...

Scientific debate of Panta Rhei research – how to advance our knowledge of changes in hydrology and society?

The Scientific Decade 2013–2022 of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) “Panta Rhei – Everything Flows” is dedicated to increasing our knowledge of interactions and feedbacks between hydrology and society. Research is focused on processes and drivers of change in the water cycle with a strong consideration of the interactions with the changing human system. The general objective is to improve our descriptions and predictions of water resources dynamics to support sustainable societal development under global change conditions (Montanari et al. 2013, McMillan et al. 2016). With this issue of the Hydrological Sciences Journal we start the Panta Rhei opinion paper series. The purpose of the series is to enrich and improve the Panta Rhei approach via diverse, critical and constructive opinions from different disciplines, “schools” and experiences. For this, we have identified key questions and debatable topics, which will be covered by invited opinion papers over the course of the next two years. Besides the two papers published in this issue, it is anticipated that two Panta Rhei opinion papers will be published in the next few volumes of Hydrological Sciences Journal at roughly four to six month intervals. The opinion papers are identifiable via the Panta Rhei logo and the subheading “Opinion paper” on the front page and will be electronically linked to the online collection of Panta Rhei opinion papers. Additionally, we want to motivate a scientific discussion in response to the contributions and topics presented.

Complexity as a streamflow metric of hydrologic alteration

We explore the potential of using a complexity measure from statistical physics as a streamflow metric of basin-scale hydrologic alteration. The complexity measure that we employ is a non-trivial function of entropy. To determine entropy, we use the so-called permutation entropy (PE) approach. The PE approach is desirable in this case since it accounts for temporal streamflow information and it only requires a weak form of stationarity to be satisfied. To compute the complexity measure and assess hydrologic alteration, we employ daily streamflow records from 22 urban basins, located in the metropolitan areas of the cities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington DC, in the United States. We use urbanization to represent hydrologic alteration since urban basins are characterized by varied and often pronounced human impacts. Based on our application of the complexity measure to urban basins, we find that complexity tends to decline with increasing hydrologic alteration while entropy rises. According to this evidence, heavily urbanized basins tend to be temporally less complex (less ordered or structured) and more random than basins with low urbanization. This complexity loss may have important implications for stream ecosystems whose ability to provide ecosystem services depend on the flow regime. We also find that the complexity measure performs better in detecting alteration to the streamflow than more conventional metrics (e.g., variance and median of streamflow). We conclude that complexity is a useful streamflow metric for assessing basin-scale hydrologic alteration.

Ensemble Streamflow Forecasting across the U.S. Mid-Atlantic Region with a Distributed Hydrological Model Forced by GEFS Reforecasts

AbstractThe quality of ensemble streamflow forecasts in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region (MAR) is investigated for short- to medium-range forecast lead times (6–168 h). To this end, a regional hydrological ensemble prediction system (RHEPS) is assembled and implemented. The RHEPS in this case comprises the ensemble meteorological forcing, a distributed hydrological model, and a statistical postprocessor. As the meteorological forcing, precipitation, and near-surface temperature outputs from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) 11-member Global Ensemble Forecast System Reforecast, version 2 (GEFSRv2), are used. The Hydrology Laboratory Research Distributed Hydrologic Model (HL-RDHM) is used as the distributed hydrological model, and a statistical autoregressive model with an exogenous variable is used as the postprocessor. To verify streamflow forecasts from the RHEPS, eight river basins in the MAR are selected, ranging in drainage area...

Scaling of the Network Instantaneous Response Function from Basin Geomorphology and Hydraulic Geometry

AbstractA challenging problem in basin-scale hydrology is the ability to represent and quantify the nonlinearity of the output hydrograph or response. An important aspect of this challenge is to clearly distinguish among different sources of nonlinearity. To address the previous, a scale-dependent network instantaneous response function (IRF) is obtained by using the theory of transport by travel times, relationships of basin geomorphology, hydraulic geometry, and the inverse Gaussian (IG) distribution. Inverse Gaussian is used to represent the network response because of its connection with diffusion processes. It is shown that both geometric and hydraulic regularity in the stream network, together with the scaling property of IG, can result in the network response being approximately scaling, implying in turn that the peak flow and time to peak of the response are scaling as well. The derived IRF has the advantage over previous formulations of explicitly distinguishing between nonlinearity and scaling. ...

Large cities get more for less: Water footprint efficiency across the US

Many urban indicators and functional citywide properties have been shown to scale with population due to agglomeration effects. We hypothesize that scaling relations may also exist for water-related urban indicators such as the water footprint. The water footprint is an indicator of water use that measures humans’ appropriation of freshwater resources. We analyze the scaling of the water footprint for 65 mid- to large-sized US cities using both empirical estimates and a social interaction network model of city functioning. The network model is used to explain the presence of any scaling exponent in the empirical estimates of the urban water footprint by linking to previous theories of urban scaling. We find that the urban water footprint tends to approximately show sublinear scaling behavior with both population and gross domestic product. Thus, large cities tend to be more water footprint efficient and productive than mid-sized cities, where efficiency and productivity are quantified, in a broad sense, as deviations from a linear scaling exponent. We find the sublinear scaling may be linked to changes in urban economic structure with city size, which lead to large cities shifting water intensive economic activities to less populated regions. In addition, we find that green water contributes to the scaling both positively by transferring the dependence of food consumption on population into the water footprint and negatively by increasing heterogeneity. Overall, the proposed scaling relations allow for the comparison of water footprint efficiency and productivity of cities. Comparing these properties and identifying deviations from the expected behavior has implications for water resources and urban sustainability.

The U.S. food–energy–water system: A blueprint to fill the mesoscale gap for science and decision-making

Food, energy, and water (FEW) are interdependent and must be examined as a coupled natural–human system. This perspective essay defines FEW systems and outlines key findings about them as a blueprint for future models to satisfy six key objectives. The first three focus on linking the FEW production and consumption to impacts on Earth cycles in a spatially specific manner in order to diagnose problems and identify potential solutions. The second three focus on describing the evolution of FEW systems to identify risks, thus empowering the FEW actors to better achieve the goals of resilience and sustainability. Four key findings about the FEW systems that guide future model development are (1) that they engage ecological, carbon, water, and nutrient cycles most powerfully among all human systems; (2) that they operate primarily at a mesoscale best captured by counties, districts, and cities; (3) that cities are hubs within the FEW system; and (4) that the FEW system forms a complex network.